Lazarus Rising
by thequeenofzombies
Summary: A fusion with Supernatural in which Tony sells his soul to save Bruce, dies, and then wakes up. From there, things get complicated- naturally. Eventual Steve/Tony
1. Chapter 1

In the end, Tony sells his soul to save Bruce.

Pretty much no one is surprised, except for Bruce, who wakes up sputtering and startled and_ angrier_ than anyone's ever seen him. He'd been dead three days, laying in the Infirmary of Stark Tower with a knife wound in his back, because he was stupid and noble and forgot to check his damn surroundings while trying to rescue a girl from a very nasty set of witches. A knife wound to the back, a punctured kidney, and he'd bled out within minutes. Tony burned the blood stained shirt and started researching immediately. Pepper would have stopped him, probably _should_ have stopped him, but she understood, in the end. You hunt with a man for nearly five years, and he becomes your brother. Pepper and Tony and Bruce were family, Tony was just _not_ going to take death as an answer. Not again.

So three days passed, and Pepper hadn't even considered funeral arrangements. When men like Tony Stark put their mind to something, they get results. Three days passed, and Pepper wasn't surprised at all when Tony came to her, grim-faced and determined.

"_What's the plan?" _she'd asked.

"_You're not gonna like it."_

Sometimes, Tony had a bad habit of stating the obvious.

But men like Tony Stark did what they wanted, so Pepper sat still when he got on his motorcycle, off to find a crossroad somewhere, off to make a deal with a demon for a man he called "brother". She had some solace, of course. Ten years was the standard time for crossroad demons, before the deal ran out. Ten years was a _long_ time, long enough for Tony and Bruce to find a way to cheat a demon. Ten years was a long enough time to air out some laundry, to bicker, to fight. Ten years was a lot of coffee, a lot of hunts, and still not enough sleep between the three of them.

Naturally, she doesn't even flinch when Bruce wakes up, sputtering. She sits and stares at him calmly when he looks around his surroundings, gets his bearings, and puts two and two together faster than any man should have the right too.

"He didn't," he says to her, knowing damn well that _he_ very well _did._

Pepper checks the wound at Bruce's back (gone), and his mental state (damned angry), and is somewhat surprised to discover that he's stronger than before (a hell of a _lot_ stronger, actually, and she's not sure if it's a side-effect of the deal or if this is a reason why Bruce doesn't get angry a whole lot.)

Overall, it goes very, very well. Extremely well. Too well.

Pepper's not stupid. She's danced this dance with Tony Stark for years, and she knows that in a business like theirs ("Saving people, hunting things, the family business" Tony says, deadpanning, parroting his father's catchphrase) nothing ever goes _well_. Things go _okay_, and sometimes they even go _alright_, but usually they just go _badly_, or _terribly_, or _fucking awful._

So, no, she can't say she's the slightest bit shocked when Tony rubs the back of his neck and tells her and Bruce that he's got a year before the reapers come to collect.

But now she and Bruce are _both_ damned angry.

She goes to the top of Stark Tower (built by Howard Stark, improved by Tony Stark after his father's death ten years ago, a beacon for hunters around the world, but to most people just a sign of the 1%, the inventors and billionaires who tower above the poor, because most people don't _know_ about things that go bump in the night, which is better for everyone.) She goes to the top of Stark Tower and reminds herself that smoking is incredibly impractical for a hunter (decreases lung capacity, makes getaways harder) and that drinking is incredibly impractical for _her _(because Tony's probably drinking, and Bruce is still injured, and one of them has to be at 100%).

She sits for awhile and breathes in the fresh air calmly, and tells herself that ten years would have been better, but that one year for Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, and Pepper Potts might as well _be_ ten years for anyone else. If anyone can dupe the Devil, it's them, and she is totally and utterly confident that they will.

Of course, in the end, they don't.

_Right, listen up kids:_

_What goes bump in the dark is real. The things that scared you as a kid were real. Vampires, werewolves, demons, and a whole score of things you've never imagined or heard of are all very, **very** real. _

_Don't be scared. No, wait, that's stupid. Be scared. Be **terrified**. Fear will keep you on edge. But don't panic, because that just gets you killed. Besides, now that you know that everything's real, you're probably not going to live the rest of your life the same. You, my friend, have become privy to a huge secret, and I highly doubt you are in a crazed enough state of mind to think you can ignore it._

_What goes bump in the dark is real, and the important thing is that you can fight it. Silver, salt, iron, good old bullets, old magic, sigils and spells- these are things that can save your life. I spent my whole life sitting through lecture after lecture about this, and my father used to say things like "there's no handbook for this, Tony! You've gotta listen!"_

_Well, there's a handbook **now**, Dad._

_Welcome to the real world. Nice to have you._

_-_Taken from A Hunter's Handguide, written by Tony Stark (-only known copy currently in possession of Virginia "Pepper" Potts-)

The Reaper comes to collect Tony's soul on a Thursday, grabbing it as Tony is trampled by Hellhounds. Pepper wants to bury him, in a casket, on a plot, like his mother Maria was buried, but Bruce is wiser. Tony is a hunter; he gets a hunter's funeral. He is salted and burned and his ashes are buried in a grave in a forest miles and miles away from New York City and Stark Tower.

Tony dies on Thursday, and Bruce and Pepper arrive back at Stark Towers on Friday. They stay that way for a week, not talking. No one talks. Bruce hides in his labs, and Pepper hides on balconies and in her room, and the echoes where Tony would laugh and Tony would smile and Tony would get too drunk and Tony would snore are filled with this ugly, empty _silence_.

Pepper sees Bruce for the first time after a week, and Bruce has a duffle bag over his shoulder and a grimace on his face. He says "sorry" and she says nothing, and she watches him go with indifference, watches as he runs away from everything.

She stays another week before she goes too, and for the first time since it was built, all of the lights in Stark Tower go out.

None of this is really all that important.

It is, technically, in the idea that it's necessary to understanding what happens next, but as a whole the little details are insignificant. It was sunny on the day Tony sold his soul, and sunny on the day Tony died, and it was partly cloudy with a 17% chance of precipitation when Bruce and Pepper burned him to ashes. The last words Tony ever said were "Does anyone else hear the growling, or is it just me? Please. Please say it isn't just me."

Bruce goes to Indonesia, and Brazil, and tries not to get angry. He puts a gun in his mouth on a dirt road in vaguely-Asia, and doesn't pull the trigger, because Tony is dead, and Bruce is alive, and that was sort of the whole point. He makes mistakes. Those will be important later.

Pepper goes to Illinois, to South Dakota, to Washington, and stays very angry. She gets drunk in a bar in vaguely-Midwest, and meets a man named Happy, who once worked for Tony Stark. He almost makes her feel like she _is_ Happy, and that's enough for now.

Pepper and Bruce are important, but the details, the details are worthless. You could write for days about the wind in Tony's hair as the Hellhound tore his intestines from him, but that isn't where the story starts, and it shouldn't be where the story starts. The important thing is that, in the end, Tony sells his soul to save Bruce.

This is what makes him worth saving.

Tony wakes up.

_That's…that's not right._

He blinks and stirs and fumbles for a bit, but he can't stretch his arms over his head because he's contained in _something_. Someone has contained him. Someone has contained Tony Stark.

That's _seriously_ not right.

Tony thinks about whether or not he left a lighter in his pocket before realizing that he doesn't actually need one. He can see fine. Oh, hey, he's in a box. Good. Perfect. Someone has put him into a box.

_Wait, I'm in a locked box with no holes, why can I see-_

The answer, he finds when he looks down, is that there is a giant, glowing, blue light coming out of his chest.

He blinks again, and feels chains tightening around his biceps, and then everything's back, crushing him.

Oh, right, yeah, _Hell_, that was a thing wasn't it?

And then Tony's scrambling, because he's _awake_, he's awake and in a box, and somehow bioluminescent, and _this_ is pretty new, isn't it? Because being awake in Hell felt different, like he was breathing smoke and ice and pain, but this air, this just feels like _air_. Stale, unused air, but still _air_, and if Tony's breathing _air_ then…

Then.

Tony takes in a large breath of _air_ (and it's not fire and ice and pain and death, it's not the screams of other people who had less of a choice in going to Hell, it's not the taste of blood and war and loss, it's just fucking _air_) and punches the box lid. Hey, it worked in Kill Bill, after all.

It takes a few more punches, but then Tony's box is losing air and filling with dirt, and Tony really should have planned this out better.

It's probably a miracle Tony doesn't die (again), but eventually he's crawling out of the dirt and into the sunlight.

Sunlight. Jesus, _sunlight_, it's been forever since he's seen the sun. It's been-

Forty years.

Forty fucking years.

Tony sort of wishes he was dead again, because he remembers, he remembers every minutes of those forty years. How old would Bruce and Pepper even be, now? Would they still be alive? Hunters, they never live long. Die young, that's the Hunter way, what with literally everything trying to kill you.

He's fully crawled out of the dirt, staring at his surroundings. Every tree in the forest is dead. There's a shiver stuck between his shoulder blades, but his emotions are dancing around his brain in a scattered sort of way. He thinks that's he's happy to be alive, but _happy_ isn't the right word. Because this is all sorts of wrong, so many different levels of "unnatural", and if Howard Stark had left anything to Tony it was one philosophy- unnatural is _bad_.

Tony stands on feet that don't quite support him and stares at his own grave. "Well. That's…surreal," he manages, throat dry and parched from _forty years_ of not having a single sip of water.

Except, except, there's no _way _Tony's been dead for forty years. His body looks absolutely _perfect_, for one. His limbs are all there, and there's no sign of decomposition, and there's a giant, glowing blue light coming out his chest-

Tony starts. Right, the chest-lamp, he'd almost forgotten about that. "That's new," he comments nonchalantly. He's fully aware that he's gotten to the point of hysteria where everything feels completely normal, and he's not entirely sure what to make of that.

For the first time in his entire life, he wishes that his father had a lecture he could remember right now. An entire childhood made of hunting, and his father had never once even started to cover the topic of "what to do if you wake up from the dead." Clearly Howard Stark was not as great a hunter as he liked to think.

Tony's head hurts, and his mouth is still completely dry, and he's slowly spinning around in a circle. _Always know your surroundings before you make any plans. Check all exits._ He's in a forest, or what used to be a forest. All of the trees are dead now, snapped in half like they got hit with some serious gale-force winds. Tony tries to tell himself that he's not terrified at _all_, he's just reincarnated and glowing and surrounded by dead trees. This is all in a day's work for Tony Stark.

He has actually no idea where he is. He assumes that Bruce and Pepper buried him in New York state, because that's where he lived and that's where he died. But they _could_ have buried him in South Dakota. They _should_ have burned his body, so that this wouldn't happen. Tony's pretty sure he's not a demon, not possessed in any form, but something literally rose him from the dead, and that's just not a good sign _ever._

After about ten minutes, he picks a direction and starts walking. He needs just a few things: a telephone, to call Pepper or Bruce and to see where he is and what's going on, a drink of water, the date, and an American cheeseburger. He figures that if he walks far enough in any given direction, he'll stumble across a diner or a gas station, and then he'll figure it out from there. Improvisation has always been his strong suit.

He finds a town within half an hour, which is impressive, even for him.

The whole place is deserted. This is slightly less impressive.

He wasn't buried with a cell phone (not even Stark men are that technologically crazy, apparently), but this weird ghost-town has a gas station, and the phone inside the station still works. Tony thinks about area codes for a minute, shrugs, and decides he's in New York and he doesn't need to worry about that.

_I swear to God Pepper if you changed your number or lost your phone I will personally haunt your ass and sing irritating pop music in your ear for the rest of eternity, so just pick up the-_

She picks up on the third wing.

"Pepper Potts, can I help you?" Oh god, it's actually Pepper, with her awful secretary way of answering the phone and everything. Tony once told her that hunters answer the phone by saying "yeah?" and nothing else, because there is only one reason to call a hunter, but Pepper never shook being polite and nice and figuring that maybe someone outside of the business would call once in a while. No one ever did, and Tony has no idea how long it's been, but she's still the same Pepper, at least a little bit.

"Pepper?" His voice is scratched raw, and he sounds weak and pathetic and like he's stuck in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, but he also knows that he still sounds like himself.

There's dead silence on the other end for one minute and twenty seven seconds (the clock in the gas station is, evidently, still working).

Then, "Whoever this, wherever you are, this is not a joke. If you call this number again, I will personally end you in the most painful and unforgiving way possible. Understand?" A pause, and Tony's mouth is opening to protest, to beg her, because this is _Tony_, it's really Tony! "Have a nice day." The line goes dead.

Tony Stark does not cry, and has never really cried. Crying was not in Howard's lesson plan. Even after his mother died, Tony only shed a few tears. He's vocal about his emotions in other ways. He drinks, and he yells, and he punches walls, but he does not cry. Yet, here he is, in the middle of an abandoned gas station, in an abandoned town, walking away from an abandoned grave, trying his hardest not to cry. His throat is working furiously to swallow back anything that even remotely sounds like it _could_ be a sob. There are better things to do than _cry_, for fuck's sake.

Bruce, for example. He hasn't called Bruce yet.

"We're sorry, the number you have dialed is unavailable."

Tony slams the phone down so hard on the receiver that he can hear the plastic crack. It's okay. He's not upset. He has no reason to be upset. It's not like he's a walking corpse with no friends or family, right?

He prowls behind the counter and finds a newspaper. He doesn't know if it's today, exactly, but it's pretty recent, judging by the condition. It tells him he's been dead four months, which doesn't make him feel any less bad or any less weird about being alive again.

Tony is seriously trying to remember the numbers of everyone he's ever known when the window cracks. He stares at it for a moment, frowning, because windows usually don't just crack. That's when the high-pitched _shrieking_ starts, and the window completely shatters, and Tony is blinded by a burst of light.

He blinks a few times, trying to get his vision back. There's a silhouette coming towards him, and that must have been what blinded him. But here's Tony, newly resurrected and with not a weapon to his name, completely and utterly screwed.

And then Tony sees it.

It's…surprisingly human.

It also looks completely mortified.

"Um," Tony says, totally dignified.

The dude standing in front of him blushes, sheepishly. For something that less than ten seconds ago was _breaking glass with super sonic screeching_, it's ridiculously attractive. In that home-town, middle-America sort of way. Seriously, the guy looks like he just waltzed out of the 1940's, hair part and cheekbones and all. Tony's sort of speechless. He's also, however, ridiculously intelligent (he _is_ a Stark after all, come on), so he's able to put two and two together. Super-sonic screeching= supernatural which means that this…1940's Army Propaganda Poster Model is the thing that brought him back to life.

Hey, maybe Uncle Sam really _did_ want Tony!

Tony takes a brief moment to shudder as his own terrible joke, before shrugging it off. He squares his shoulders, shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, and tenses himself. Fighting stance. This is thing is probably evil, after all.

"Alright Tall, Blonde, and Supernatural," Tony sneers, glaring at _it_. (Even if it looks like a Him, it's still totally an _it_. Witches are bitches, but they're not powerful enough to lift the dead. Well, not as well as Tony's been lifted, at least.) "What the hell's your business here?"

The dude just blinks at him, like he doesn't understand the question. Which, you know, rude- it's not like this thing was just blinded and deafened but it's own supernatural sonic light-thingy. Tony circles his hands a bit, trying to prompt it.

"My name is Stelva, and I am the one who…gripped you tight and raised you from perdition." At the last part, the…_thing_ squares its shoulders, and juts its chin out. Tony's a bit confused, but if he had to hazard a guess, he'd say the thing isn't quite used to moving around yet. There's something awkward about the way it holds itself, like it has spent it's whole life without the bulk of muscles to weigh it down.

In fact, the thing almost looks like it's _wearing_ the skin it's in, instead of living in it.

Tony blinks at it, eyebrows drawing together. "Right," he drawls, leaning against the counter. He looks nonchalant, but he isn't. He's been a hunter since…well, always, so he knows better than to let his guard down. "So tell me, Stella, how _exactly_ did you…what did say? Raise me tightly from perdition, or whatever?"

The thing narrows it's eyes at Tony, almost like it doesn't understand the concept of being sassed-at.

"My name is _Stevla_-"

"Stevla's a stupid name, though," Tony grouses. "I'm just gonna call you Steve, okay? You're Steve now. Still doesn't answer the question."

Steve looks even more irritated than before, but Tony's still pretty sure the thing doesn't know _what_ irritated it. It seems rather confused by the fact that Tony's being insubordinate, which, hey. Clearly this guy did not know what he was getting into if he didn't think _Tony Stark_ was gonna be insubordinate.

"I," Steve says, strong and certain and sort of booming (in a totally natural way, thankfully). "I am an Angel of the Lord."

Tony sputters.

"Seriously," he groans, slamming his head on the countertop. "What the _fuck_ is my life?"

**Note: **I haven't posted fanfiction in forever, but what can I say? I was inspired. Hope you enjoyed!


	2. Chapter 2

"_A hunter's life is not a very social one. You're not going to have a lot of friends. You're not going to go to a lot of parties. You're probably not going to stay close to the things you had before you became a hunter. People who don't know about what you do become a liability. They become dangerous. Keeping anyone around who can't defend themselves is a bad idea._

_I know that humans like to think they're the most dangerous things on Earth, but that's a load of bull. A lot of Supernatural baddies used to **be** human, and a lot of them still remember. The ones that don't are feral, and usually bigger or stronger than you. You are never going to have an easy hunt. There will be **easier** jobs, and there will be easier days, but there will never, ever be an easy one. My suggestion to do one of two things; either tell the people you care about most the truth, teach them to fight, and bring them with you, or cut your ties._

_If you're going to hunt with someone you already know, they better be **very** close to you. I'm talking people you've always known, people you can trust with your life. _

_If you're going to cut your ties, find other hunters. There are ways. Stark Tower is hunter central, these days- most hunters know who I am and what I do, and I keep track of most of who they are and what they do. If you need a helping hand, feel free to swing into NYC and pay us a visit. Just tell the elevator that your name is Mr./Ms. Colt. It'll take you to the right place._

_If you decide not to utilize my vast hunter resources, then be aware that you're probably going to run into other hunters eventually. Hunting on your own is not something I'd recommend. It's always better to have someone watch your back. Hell, I have **two** people watching mine and I still manage to get my ass beat most days. _

_Meet other hunters, help them with jobs, find someone with whom you work well and start to trust them. Call me. Come visit. I'll help. That's what I'm here for._

_Just don't go it on your own. I've known more than a few people who've never had any help, and most of them are dead before the years out. Hunters don't have long life expectancy's, but that doesn't mean you have to die right away. It's always better to have a team._

_Always._

-Taken from A Hunter's Handguide, written by Tony Stark (-only known copy currently in possession of Virginia "Pepper" Potts-)

Tony doesn't believe in angels. He still doesn't really believe in angels, and he's staring one in the face. Not that the dude looks like an angel, he just looks like a…well, like a dude. Or, he'd look more like a dude if he wasn't so clearly uncomfortable in his own body. Years of hunting demons has taught Tony a thing or two about possession, and this is obviously not the angel's real body. It's clear in subtle things, the way they stand, the way they breathe. This is someone else's skin.

Tony is suddenly very, very pissed.

"What poor sap are you even wearing?" he snaps, waving his hand at Steve. "You think that just because you're on the side of God you can take control of whoever you want and that makes you better than demons?"

Steve doesn't even bristle at that. He just narrows his eyes and stares Tony down, like Tony's done something stupid, insolent, and incredibly rude. Which, hey, Tony gets it. He's being an asshole to the thing that apparently pulled him out of hell. The angel more than most likely doesn't think he deserves this standoffish behavior.

But Tony can't help it. There's a glowing blue light in his chest, and his friends are all gone, and he's _dead_, he's a walking dead man. That's not right. That's not natural. Tony hated Hell, hated every second, and he still feels the vertigo of it, even though he's been alive for hours now. It's pushing him down like a pressure on his entire soul, and Tony thinks that at least in Hell he wasn't really aware of what he was doing. He was just going through the motions. It was painless, easy. Enjoyable, almost. Here, on Earth, everything's too bright and too loud and too much. Living is hard. Tony remembers that. He remembers burying his mother, and father, and most of his friends. He remembers having to do his own stitches when no one else was around. He remembers standing vigil by Bruce's, or Pepper's besides, wondering if he had to bury them, too. He remembers Bruce _dying_, every second of it, and he remembers the slick slide of the demon's lips against his own. He remembers that kiss sealing the deal and he remembers living his year and getting gutted by hellhounds, and none of it is a particularly _happy_ experience to remember. Living was _hard_, and now he's got to do it again. Only this time, he's a freak. He's at least part monster. What's to say that Pepper and Bruce won't hunt _him_ now? What's to say they _shouldn't_? He remembers what he did in Hell, he _knows_.

He's turned into the thing he hunts, and it's _completely awful_.

Steve stares at him strangely, like Tony is a puzzle Steve can't quite put together. "Are, uh." Steve stops, licking his lips. Tony takes note, again. _Not used to speaking English?_ goes into his mental checklist of things he can now reasonably say are true about angels. Steve tries again. "This is a vessel, not a possession. Angel vessels need to…agree to hosting the angel. This man was devout. He said yes. It's not like demons at all."

"Frankly," Tony deadpans, "I don't really see how it's much different than demons. You're wearing a man like a skin suit. You've killed him."

At this, Steve full out glares. Tony adds another fact to his mental checklist- _Can feel emotions. Sort of._

"You walk into the homes of people and shoot them for a living, Tony," Steve says flatly. Tony jerks a bit, startled. "These creatures are trying to survive, trying to eat, and for that you walk into their natural habitats and shoot them with silver and salt. Take away the food chain that you believe you sit on top of. Make humans as equal as every other thing on this planet. Take away the words 'monster' and 'creature' and all you are is a man with a gun. All you are is a _killer_." Steve spits the last word like it's the worst possible thing you could be.

Which, okay, Tony concedes that he might have a point about that.

But not about the rest of it. "I kill things that _kill people!_" Tony flails his arms about. "I save people, I help people, I stop people from dying," he huffs, irritated. "Yeah, okay, I have to kill stuff to do it, but it's for the greater good!"

Steve sighs, the fight going out of him in a moment. It's not resignation, though. He's not saying that Tony's right. It's more like he's remembering that arguing with humans is pointless and stupid, and that fighting with Tony is beneath him, is a waste of his time. "I don't like bullies," Steve says simply, his face carefully blank again.

_Are a bunch of dicks_, Tony adds to knowledge of angels.

"Then why even _save_ me?" He spits, glaring. "Why not save one of the hundreds of other people who _aren't_ bullies, huh? Why pull my sorry, nasty ass from the pit?"

Something in Steve falters a bit. Tony blinks, eyes narrowing.

"You-" Steve abruptly cuts himself off, frowning deeply. Tony, being an irritating asshole at the best of times (his words, and Pepper's) makes a show of it, glancing around the room as if whatever stopped Steve is visible and real. He then gestures, circling his hands in the universal signal for _spit it out already!_ Steve, if at all possible, frowns even deeper. "You really don't know," Steve states blankly.

"Obviously I don't know, why else would I ask? Get on with it, would you, I have people to find." Which is sort of a lie- he _does_ have people to find, but he has no clue where or how to start finding them. Or if they _want_ to be found.

"You're the Righteous Man." Steve is looking at Tony expectantly, like Tony is supposed to totally comprehend the meaning of the life, universe, and everything now.

"Oh, right," Tony snarks. "That makes perfect sense now, everything is clear as a window, thanks for that wonderful tidbit of information. Feathers, why don't you try to stop being cryptic for ten minutes and give me a straight up answer, yeah?" Tony is way too tired to be dealing with this shit, he just wants to find Stark Tower, and Bruce and Pepper, and find a way back into something normal.

Steve scrunches his face up like a puppy. It's almost adorable, which makes Tony a bit sick to his stomach, because supernatural creatures are _not_ adorable. Even Steve, with his stupid 40's hairdo and All-American-Style is clearly some form of badass- the dude went into the Pit and lifted Tony's ass from Hell. He probably had to rebuild Tony from scratch actually- _which, hey, that reminds me._

"Also, what in the world is _this_?" Tony demands, gesturing at the glowy blue light in his chest.

Steve looks a bit sheepish, at the very least. "I, uh, had to rebuild you, and use my grace to bring you out of the Pit," he offers. "I guess some of it got…stuck."

"Stuck." Tony says, flatly. Steve nods.

Tony can feel the migraine from a mile away. He pinches the bridge of his nose, gesturing again. "Look, right, whatever, you were saying about this whole Righteous Man shtick?"

Steve pulls a hand through his hair, and for a second Tony thinks that he looks genuinely frustrated. Tony wonders if all angels are like this. There's an image in Tony's head, left from his Mother- _Angels are watching over you, Anthony_. Angels are tiny chubby babies with wings, or they're unfeeling soldiers and messengers for God. They aren't supposed to be _exasperated_.

A tiny voice in his head that sounds an awful lot like Pepper chirps _Well, you just have that affect on people, Tony._

"It's complicated," Steve supplies, which is not very helpful at all. Tony thinks he might be able to get that point across by staring at Steve in his most unimpressed manner.

A minute ticks by before Steve cracks.

"You're on a need-to-know-basis," Steve states, as if this is somehow more helpful. It really, really isn't.

"Look, bub-"

"God has work for you to do."

Tony stops short. He feels a bit like he's been kicked in the chest, in that there's no more air in his lungs and he can't bring forth the energy to fix that situation.

_God_? God has work for Tony? God, who killed Tony's mother, who made his Father into an asshole, who made Tony a hunter, who killed Tony's father, who killed Bruce, who killed _Tony_. God, who Tony has never believed in, who Tony has never spared a thought towards. God who has stood upon a hill and watched Tony's life turn to utter _shit_ and not cared _at all_, suddenly has _work_ for Tony? Tony Stark, the man who hates God almost as much as demons?

Steve barrels on like he hasn't noticed Tony's sudden inability to breathe. "You'll learn more when you need to learn more, but the less you know the better."

"No," Tony gasps out, finding air in his own utter irritation with this whole shitstorm. "No, I don't know what your…_superiors_ told you, but taking blind orders is _not_ how I fucking work, okay?" Tony doesn't go in blind, doesn't listen to anyone besides Pepper and Bruce. He works in _teams_. He doesn't _take orders_.

Steve narrows his eyes again. "I don't know if you noticed, Stark, but you're not exactly in position to be giving orders around here. God needs you, and that's all you need to know right now. I'd focus less on how hard it is for you to follow orders and more on how many contacts you need to remake. Four months is a long time to be dead."

Tony opens his mouth to snap something back- a no doubt well formed and witty comment that he hasn't quite thought of yet- but Steve ignores him entirely.

"Take some time to get your bearings. We'll find you when we need you."

And then Tony really _does_ lose the air in his lungs.

Two massive black shadows outline the wall being Steve's back. _Wings_, Tony thinks, dumbfounded. _Actual wings_. Not that they're exactly visible to Tony, or anything- all he can see is an outline, but it's enough. They spread farther than the length of the store, casting shadow across bits of the ceiling and windows as well. The outlines of feathers ruffle a bit with the wind, and Tony feels electricity humming through his veins. Suddenly, Tony gets the whole "angel" thing. Warriors of God? Totally. Tony doubts that a bullet could stop this guy, doubts that it would even hurt.

Then, in a snap that sounds an awful lot like a wing beat, Steve is gone.

And Tony's alone, alive, in the middle of dead-nowhere, with no one to call.

His yell of frustration echoes through the entire ghost-town.

Phil Coulson slides into a booth at a dingy diner somewhere in Virginia at exactly 9:43:26 AM. He's not wearing a watch, but he knows this, because he's done it before. He's done it a _lot_ before.

He's had this dream about 9 times, now. It's always exactly the same, down to the littlest detail. He wears his nice suit and pants, and he looks dramatically out of place compared to everyone else. He's in the third booth on the far side of the diner, facing the door and watching who enters and exits. He orders coffee, black, and doesn't touch it. It goes cold as he watches eight people enter and exit the diner- a woman and her two kids, who are screaming and playing with Power Rangers enter first, and then an older man leaves, a waitress comes in for her shift, and replaces the woman who served him his coffee, and as she leaves, two people walk into the diner.

At first, they look fairly unassuming. She has fire-red hair and a pretty face. The corner of her lips are turned up in a smirk, and she's wearing all black- black pants, black boots, black tank top, black jacket. He has a more colored motif, but not by much. His pants are black, his shirt is black, and his sweatshirt is dark purple. His hair is cropped short, brown, and he's wearing mirrored sunglasses. He's smiling and telling a story, and they slide in the booth closest to the door. He faces the entrance, and she puts her back to it. They look normal.

They aren't. Phil knows that, combined, they have sixteen weapons currently on them- not counting his bow and arrows, which are currently in the dark SUV parked in the lot, and not counting her lean, powerful body, which is a weapon in itself. They never really relax, not fully; their posture is always straight and ready for a fight. They order coffee and pancakes, and they laugh and talk about seemingly nothing- people from work, what they did over the weekend, their families- but it's all code. Everything is code, or lies, or stories.

Phil knows this by heart, because he's had this dream 9 times. But this time, it's not a dream.

He's still not entirely sure what propelled him into ditching out on his high-paying job for a recurring dream. A recurring dream shouldn't mean anything, but he woke up in DC a week ago and realized that if he left now, he could get to Nowhere, Virginia with time to spare. He knew the date he meets the couple at the diner, had it ingrained into his memory, but he didn't actually ever think he was going to _go_.

And yet, here he is, watching them in real life.

Phil takes a sip of his now cold coffee, grimaces, stands up, and walks towards their table.

He stands in front of it, and they both stop talking instantly, turning their eyes to stare at him coldly.

"Can we help you?" the man asks darkly, eyes narrowed. His sunglasses are lying just left to his wrist, next to his coffee, which has cream and two sugars in it even though he prefers it black just because it irritates her when he "taints coffee."

Phil has really thorough dreams. Thorough enough that he knows what he's going to say now, to this couple at this diner on this date. He knows what he's going to say but it still feels weird to say it- still feels utterly surreal to be living out a dream. His heart hammers away, and he wonders if this was all a mistake. He should turn tail, jump in his car, drive back to DC. He should find his boss, apologize for missing work, beg not to be fired. He should let this couple drive away, into their lives, and he should ignore every dream he has after this.

But he already knows he's going to talk, so what's the point in pretending that he isn't?

"Your names are Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, but that's not what your I.D's say, and you're here in Virginia hunting a werewolf that's on a four-city bite streak, because that's what you do. You hunt monsters." He pauses, licking his lips. "You're hunters."

There's a long pause, and Phil belatedly realizes that this is where the dream always leaves off. He's never finished this scene, in this diner. He's seen other scenes- scenes between the two of them that he thinks have already happened (there's a scar on Clint's shoulder that Phil is sure came from the bloodbath in Budapest, Missouri), and he's seen things that he's pretty sure _haven't_ happened yet (there's a man named Tony Stark, he tells himself, a man named Tony Stark that he needs to find. There's a tower in New York that he needs to get to, because Tony Stark needs him.) This moment, however, has no conclusion as far as Phil knows. He doesn't know how Clint and Natasha will react to this, but he's pretty certain that it's _not very well at all._

Sure enough, Natasha smiles a smile that's all teeth, and Clint grabs his arm and shoves him into the booth. Something pokes into his side, and something else into his knee. Clint's holding a knife far enough away that Phil can breathe regularly, but the barrel of a small pistol pressed into his kneecap courtesy of Natasha has him more nervous than ever before.

"Who are you," Natasha says slowly, still smiling, "and what do you want?"

Phil's alone. He has no vision to guide him, no idea of what he's going to say or what's going to happen to him. He's alone, sinking in the present, and it's utterly _terrifying_. But he's got to say something, because Natasha's smile is getting more predatory by the minute.

"My name's Phil Coulson," he says, sharply. "And I think I might be a prophet of the Lord."

Natasha's smile falls completely, and the table falls into silence.

Then, Clint bursts into laughter.

Phil had had a small, but comfortable, job in a Government Agency in D.C. that the public is not technically allowed to know of. He'd worked steady, if completely awful hours- waking up each morning at 5:30AM and falling into bed at 1AM. He'd learned a lot of useful information in a Government job; he can fire a gun, and he can file paperwork. He can blend seamlessly into the background of almost any scene he's in. He can _really_ pull of a suit and tie.

There are, however, a lot of things he didn't learn. He's never had a relationship lasting more than three months- and that includes high school and college. There was a cellist at the D.C. Symphony he met at a party over a year ago, and he'd rather liked her, but she'd moved to Portland, and Phil never did well at keeping track of things not immediately in front of him and important.

Phil also cannot tie knots particularly well, or fix a car, or paint a house. He cannot taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi. He has a killer sense of direction, and knows four languages, but art movies give him headaches. He cannot stomach any alcohol except for Jack Daniels.

The thing is that these are stupid details, and Phil's always been a big fan of stupid details. He's a firm believer of the Devil being in them, and he knows that missions only ever go wrong when people miss the insignificant things. (An operative once got her cover blown and four people killed because she'd forgotten that her cover identity was lactose intolerant, and had eaten a single cube of cheddar cheese.) Phil knows that most of his character is _in_ the details; that without his DVD collection of Star Trek (original and Next Generation), or the letters from his mother in the box under his bed, or the unopened bottle of red wine in his fridge that was a gift from his Portland cellist that he won't drink but can't throw away, he'd be a whole lot of nothing. He'd be another man in a suit heading to work in a Government agency in D.C. He'd be nothing.

Tony Stark is very similar, if in a bizarrely different way. He's more of a big-picture guy; he never forgets the details, but only of other people. If you asked him, he probably couldn't tell you if he preferred Coke or Pepsi. He couldn't tell you his favorite movie, or what he likes to do when he's sick, or his favorite childhood memory. He's never _thought_ about that stuff, never stopped for a minute to consider it. He doesn't remember to sleep, and he often forgets to eat, and most days he's just holding himself together because there's a bigger picture. He has monsters to fight, and alcohol to drink, and people to be close to. He doesn't need to know the difference between Coke and Pepsi, because it _doesn't fucking matter_.

This is why Phil Coulson is able to convince Natasha and Clint that he _knows_ them, and why Tony Stark would be terribly ill suited for the job. Phil doesn't know a lot of big picture stuff. He's not sure how Clint and Natasha met, or where they grew up, or any of that. He does know how Clint takes his coffee, though. He knows that Natasha loves rainy days, and that Clint's favorite book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. He knows that the air conditioning in their car is busted, and that Clint learned how to shoot arrows at the age of seven, and that Natasha has never officially defected from Russia, she just came to America and got a fake I.D. and never looked back. He knows that their _real_ names are Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, and that's basically enough to get them to buy into it.

Tony would, invariably, focus on other sorts of things. He'd want to know if Clint and Natasha were sleeping together, or if they loved each other, or if they were just too stubborn to admit it. He'd want to know about Clint's father and mother, so he could make a totally accurate assumption of his character based solely on that. He'd want to know Natasha's past, and her present, and her plans for the future, and he wouldn't care at all if they disliked Animal Farm or stayed up late watching Project Runway reruns.

Ultimately, it makes their whole order in the universe rather confusing. Phil's task is as a prophet, meaning that at the end of the day he'll have to sit down and write the Gospels. And since when has the Gospel ever said what Jesus' favorite food was, or what he did in his spare time, or if he liked his job or fought with his parents or drank too much? Since when has the Gospel cared about the details that don't matter? Tony, as the new messiah, is also a contradiction. As much as the _old_ messiahs were selfless, they were selfless is utterly different ways. Tony is arrogant and conceited and doesn't play well with others. He can't get along with an _angel_. How is he supposed to get out of his own head long enough to fight the Devil?

But Tony Stark would never be able to convince Natasha and Clint that he was a Prophet of God, and Phil Coulson would never be able to lead an army of hunters against the powers of Hell.

This is what Steve the Angel dwells on as he receives his new orders. He'd, personally, rather deal with Phil, who's much more mild-mannered and easy to talk too. But Steve gets Tony, and he just has to deal with that. His garrison leader gets to deal with Phil, and sends Steve off with a bark of orders, a list of what Steve is and isn't allowed to tell Tony.

Tony had managed to hitch a ride a few hours back, and is currently in a pickup barreling its way to Stark Tower. Steve glares at the tower, an ugly, garish testament to the self-centered richness at the center of Tony Stark's heart. What sort of Righteous Man builds a Tower to _himself_ in the middle of New York City?

(When she first sees it, Natasha Romanoff will ask the same question, phrased a bit differently. "What sort of hunter makes himself so _obvious_?" she'll spit, with a good mix of curiosity and genuine distaste.

Clint, who always had better eyesight than she did, would raise an eyebrow and smirk. "Maybe that's the point," he'll mutter, and he'll get as close to the truth behind Stark Tower as anyone outside of the Terrible Trio of Tony, Bruce, and Pepper ever will.)

Steve knows that the smart thing to do would be to drop himself into Tony's car right now, and tell Tony what he needs to know, because Steve has other matters to attend to. However, Steve is delaying for two particularly good reasons. The first is that Tony's not driving, he's being driven, and alerting any more people to the truth of the Supernatural is not on Steve's to-do list. The second is that Tony Stark is an utter _mess_ to deal with, and Steve really doesn't _want_ too.

It's sort of a bizarre concept to Steve, actually. He's still fairly new to Earth, having first touched down sometime in the 1940's for about a year. He was sent back quickly, and his first time out of Heaven since then was pulling Tony out of Hell, in mid 2012. It's not a long time to have gotten used to Earth, overall. Steve is still unused to his body, still unused to human emotions, and the first time he's ever really _felt_ anything has been in the face of Tony Stark.

Steve _wants_ things, now. Most of them are silly; things like wanting to get Tony to shut up, or wanting to punch Tony's face, or wanting to show Tony his wings, wanting to impress and scare Tony into following, blindly.

Steve, however, also _doesn't_ want most of these things. He thinks that Tony is much more terrifying quiet, because that's how Tony had been in Hell. _Silent_. He knows that if he punches Tony, Tony's neck will snap, and Steve certainly doesn't want to face the Apocalypse without the Righteous Man to end it. He doesn't want to make Tony follow him, because Tony had followed orders in Hell. Tony had ripped apart damned souls and stitched them back together to rip them apart again, and Steve doesn't _want_ to see that. Steve doesn't want to see Tony as a vicious, violent person, even if he knows that at least a part of Tony enjoys it. A part of every hunter enjoys killing.

Steve has never liked bullies, has never liked killers, has never been able to stand it, so the more he can distance the savior of all of the world from the act of murder, the better.

Steve doesn't understand the weird, complex mix of _want_ and _not want_, so he sits on a hill and waits for Tony to get to Stark Tower and tries desperately to ignore it.

Tony gets to Stark Tower and feels like sobbing at the sight of it.

The lights are off.

Pepper and Bruce are gone.

In theory, Tony already knew this, but _knowing_ something and _seeing_ something are two totally different things.

Tony scrubs hands through his hair and tries to open the front door, which is, of course, locked shut. He groans, angrily, and sets off to find something suitable to break a window with. He tries very, very hard not to be angry that Pepper and Bruce left, tries very hard not to be mad that they abandoned everything Tony worked so hard for, and fails miserably. He pictures Pepper's face caving in instead of the window, and relishes the way the glass scrapes against his knuckles.

He's _alive_, damnit. He's _alive_.

He heads to the break room to see if there's any chance of getting JARVIS, the AI that runs the whole building, back on.

It's there that he meets Steve for the second time that day.

"Jesus shit!" Tony barks, scrambling away from the Angel who just _appeared_ in the control room.

Steve frowns. "Is the blasphemy necessary?" he sighs, long-suffering, as if he and Tony didn't just meet this morning.

"Fuck yes, it is," Tony bites back, crossing his arms. "What do you need? I thought you'd only find me when you _needed_ me."

"We need you," Steve says flatly.

Tony doesn't really have a response to that.

In the silence, Steve barrels on. "The apocalypse is happening."

Tony blinks, stunned silent for a moment. "You couldn't have found a less blunt way of saying that, huh?"

Steve stares _straight through_ Tony, and Tony shudders with it, because, wow, _creepy_. "Would you have wanted me to be less blunt?" Steve questions, cocking his head a bit like a confused puppy. And, really, Tony needs to stop seeing an _Angel of the Lord_ as a puppy, because it's disturbing and inappropriate. The dude has _wings_, he's probably way more intimidating than a puppy is.

Tony sighs, and decides he's much too tired to do anything but tell the truth. "Not really."

Steve nods like he expected this _(can read minds_? Tony adds to his list). "The apocalypse is happening, and you need to stop it."

Tony shrugs, leaning against a wall. "We talking, like, Book of Revelations Apocalypse? Or, like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apocalypse every season Apocalypse?"

Steve furrows his brow. "I don't underst- you've read the Book of Revelations?" He seems genuinely unable to process which bit of Tony's sentence was the most confusing.

Tony shrugs. "Lore's important. I've read most of it."

Steve doesn't seem totally impressed with this answer, but he continues on anyway. "Lucifer is rising. You need to stop him."

Tony waits for there to be more to that sentence, but there isn't. "Uh. _How?_" he demands, because really? What's he supposed to do, just walk up and ask the Devil if he could _not_ destroy the world?

"That's…complicated," Steve admits, staring anywhere but Tony's eyes. There's more silence, and just when Tony is getting ready to punch the _shit_ out of Steve, consequences be damned, Steve speaks up again. "In order for Lucifer to rise, there are 33 seals that need to be broken. Seals being various events," he clarifies at Tony's lost look. "There are certain things that need to happen, rituals and moments and all that. If the 33 seals fail to be broken, Lucifer won't rise."

"So my job is stop, what, demons-" Steve nods, here- "from breaking all 33 seals?" Tony frowns. "Why me?"

"You're the Righteous Man," Steve says, as if that explains everything.

"A real answer, if you would?" Tony bitches, glaring.

A long second passes where Steve glares at Tony right back, and an electric tension builds up in Tony's spine. Finally, Steve sighs, defeated. "There really _isn't_ another answer. It's hard to explain. Only the Righteous Man can be brought up from hell, and only the Righteous Man can defeat Lucifer. It is written. That's it."

Tony scrubs his hands over his face, wondering when this became his life. Or death. Post death. Relife. _Whatever._

"So _how_ do I stop the Seals from being broken, exactly?"

"We'll tell you the where and the when," Steve says in a weird, flat, hollow voice. "You figure out the how."

Tony looks up at Steve, combing him over curiously. It _sounds_ like Steve is spitting a quote into Tony's face. Like someone higher up said those exact words, and now Steve is giving them back to Tony. Tony wonders who would be higher up than Steve, who would control the Angel who flew into Hell and brought him back to life and left a little grace in his chest.

"That's helpful," Tony deadpans, because he's a bastard like that.

Steve just shrugs.

Somewhere in a dirt-cheap, makeshift hospital in India, Bruce Banner is awoken by the sound of someone else in his room.

He takes calming breaths, reminds himself that he's just being _robbed_, that there's nothing to panic about, and sits up, carefully.

There's a bald black man with an eyepatch and a trench coat staring back at him.

"Dr. Banner," the man greets with a steely sort of amusement. Bruce blinks back, before sighing and pulling himself out of bed.

"To whom do I owe the pleasure?" Bruce asks amiably, trying to be as unassuming and non-threatening as possible. That's his deal, after all, and this man must be important if he needed to track Bruce all the way _here_ for a conversation.

The man smiles back. "You can call me the Angel of Fury," he says in a voice that's thick with something ironic. "Most people do."

"Fury?" Bruce asks, glancing him up and down. "You don't seem too angry to me." He doesn't, really. The man is intimidating, sure, and could probably kick Bruce's ass in a fight (_could have_ kicked Bruce's ass, _could have_), but he's got a small smile on his face, and isn't standing in a defensive manner at all. He seems fairly normal.

Which is bizarre, because Bruce in the dead middle of nowhere, India, in a den filled with people who were possessed or are being possessed by demons.

"Neither do you, Dr. Banner," the man says. "But demons are very angry creatures. I imagine drinking their blood hasn't done great things to your attitude."

Bruce starts, feels the transformation start to grip him, and tries to shut it down immediately. _Don't panic_, he tells himself. _You __**can't**__ panic. _But someone _knows_, someone _knows _what he's done and who he is, and that sends Bruce's heart rate into the sky. He tries to breathe, slowly, surely.

As he slowly regains control, Fury continues to speak. "Your experiment didn't go as well as you imagined it would, did it? You thought the blood would make you stronger, thought it'd help you understand demons better. Never thought it would turn you into the monster, right?"

"What do you _want_," Bruce spits with more desperation then he intended too. He hasn't been this out of control since the beginning. Four months of practice had done him nothing in the long run, it seems.

"I thought you'd like to know that your friend Tony Stark is alive," Fury says like he's telling Bruce the weather. Something turns to ice in Bruce's stomach. "Now you and him can be the same, again. The hunters who turned into the things they hunted, getting together to save the world."

Bruce doesn't find this joke very funny, and is distinctly _not_ amused. He's not angry, though. He's trying so hard to be _not angry_.

Fury, as if he can sense how much Bruce doesn't buy it, throws a newspaper at Bruce's feet. It's the New York Times, and the lead of the Business section reads "Stark Towers Goes Bright Again."

Someone has turned the lights on in Stark Tower, and only three people in the _world_ know how to do that- and it sure as hell wasn't him or Pepper.

"How did you find me?" Bruce asks instead, because he can't take this, he can't see right. His vision is tinted with green and he needs a distraction.

"We never lost you, Dr. Banner," Fury says with a clam fondness.

Bruce looks up at him, searching, but finds nothing in the man's exterior. "That's impossible," Bruce says simply, because it is. "Tony being alive is _impossible_. This is, all of this is _impossible_."

"Demons are impossible," Fury counters, walking towards Bruce. "Wendigos. Djinns. Angels." He smirks, gesturing mildly to Bruce. "Whatever _you_ are is _impossible_, Dr. Banner." He smiles fully now, in a way that scares Bruce out of being angry, and straight into being curious. "My type tend to deal in impossibilities."

Suddenly, Fury is taking steps away from Bruce. "Mr. Stark could tell you more about it. He might need you to help him with this hunt. Believe me, it's a big one." Fury regards him. "He could use your head. I'd go find him, if I were you."

And then, with what sounds like a flap of wings, Fury is gone.

Bruce stares at the spot where he was for a minute, before swearing and heading off to find the nearest airport.


End file.
